Apple is on the verge of updating its Airport Extreme offerings and may …

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Apple has updated its AirPort Extremes and Time Capsules, and may have already started the process on the latter. What do we mean by that? Apple's Time Capsule page has already been updated to reflected new 2TB and 3TB models (the previous model only had 1TB of storage), though when you click through to purchase, the Apple Online Store only shows the old, 1TB model.

Various sources, including 9to5Mac, published part numbers for three new devices: a fifth-generation Airport Extreme and two new fourth-generation Time Capsules. Soon thereafter, the Federal Communications Commission published Apple's filing for the new Airport Extreme, indicating that a release is fast approaching. As noted by MacRumors, Apple usually times the release of FCC documents for the day the company actually plans to unveil the product, meaning that official releases should come sometime today.

Rumors about new AirPort Extremes and Time Capsules have been going around since at least the beginning of June, and there was some talk that Apple would be trying to use Time Capsules as an intermediary cache for software updates for Mac OS X and iOS. So far, Apple's updated Time Capsule page doesn't seem to indicate that this feature is shipping in the final product, but we'll update if that changes.

(Update: the 2TB Time Capsule is now being listed for $299 and the 3TB version for $499. Apple has also updated its Airport Extreme store page and it's still being listed for $179.)

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

It depends on your perspective. Don't get me wrong, for techies, it's a complete ripoff.

However, for people like my mother-in-law and parents, Time Capsules are worth their weight in gold. The overpriced thing works with Time Machine to automagically take frequent backups and store them over wifi. To get any lost data back, you go through the Time Machine interface to the point in time where you want to restore, and it pulls it back down. Want to restore 1 file? Pick it out. Want to restore a directory? Select that. Want to restore your entire machine to the state it was in 3 months ago? It does that. I haven't seen another product on the market that does what Time Machine/Capsules do that is as easy to use.

To give you a use case - my MiL accidentally duplicated every song in her music collection, loaded them into iTunes (screwing up her iTunes library), then while trying to address that, blew away her entire music collection. She even emptied her trashcan. If TM/TC hadn't been taking automatic backups of her Macbook Pro, she would have lost everything. Because I had forced her to buy it, I was able to walk her through restoring her music folder to the day before and resolved the issue.

$500 ain't cheap, but the product is awesome.

It's a $500 AFP mount. You don't need a Time Capsule for that. You can just use a really cheap and generic external drive. Infact, for the average Mac user you can probably get away with a lot less in terms of storage.

Time Machine is potentially somewhat interesting. A Time Capsule is just a product from inside the Walled Garden that Time Machine plays nicely with.

If it's for backups then there should be multiple copies. That's how people who do serious backups do backups. You can be creating garbage for days or weeks or a single piece of media can fail. If you're going to bother, then you might as well try and do it right. Otherwise you are taking advantage of n00bs and giving them a false sense of security.

There are multiple copies. The copy on the Capsule and the copy on your hard drive.Some people won't bother if they have to "try".

Are Airports still incompatible with SonicWall VPN, which I have to use for my work PC? I had to get a Linksys for this reason.

Not to be a fanboy, but to me it seems that Time Machine is the best backup software ever made. It automatically backs up multiple versions of all files, including everything needed to make a bootable drive. My work IS guy has been looking for something like this for Windows, but all the Windows backup software we've looked at sux. Does anyone know of a Windows backup program that does everything Time Machine does? Thanks for any good suggestions.

I've been using an airport extreme with sonic wall VPN for about the last four years with no problems.

I also don't see the complaint about the range on the extreme. I have the model before the time capsule was introduced and I get wifi 100 feet up my Back garden and about 100 feet outside my property. maybe the guy has three feet thick Walls or lives in a faraday cage.

It's a $500 AFP mount. You don't need a Time Capsule for that. You can just use a really cheap and generic external drive. Infact, for the average Mac user you can probably get away with a lot less in terms of storage.

Time Machine is potentially somewhat interesting. A Time Capsule is just a product from inside the Walled Garden that Time Machine plays nicely with.

You are paying for he industrial design. You can hook a USB hub up to an airport extreme and have a bunch of USB drives acting as nas disks already. This is just the convenience of having less wires on the shelf.

Looking at the hardware specs this thing contains just a single disk 2-3TB Disk without any kind of redundancy. Must be great losing 3TB worth of backups. Typical Apple Product.

It's for backup, not archiving.

If it's for backups then there should be multiple copies. That's how people who do serious backups do backups. You can be creating garbage for days or weeks or a single piece of media can fail. If you're going to bother, then you might as well try and do it right. Otherwise you are taking advantage of n00bs and giving them a false sense of security.

There are multiple copies: there is the original, and there is one on the Time Capsule. How is that not multiple? And drive redundancy is not creating multiple copies, so how is that the solution? Seriously, what is your solution to get a backup made to multiple media sets and have it be easy to use by most users?

It depends on your perspective. Don't get me wrong, for techies, it's a complete ripoff.

However, for people like my mother-in-law and parents, Time Capsules are worth their weight in gold. The overpriced thing works with Time Machine to automagically take frequent backups and store them over wifi. To get any lost data back, you go through the Time Machine interface to the point in time where you want to restore, and it pulls it back down. Want to restore 1 file? Pick it out. Want to restore a directory? Select that. Want to restore your entire machine to the state it was in 3 months ago? It does that. I haven't seen another product on the market that does what Time Machine/Capsules do that is as easy to use.

To give you a use case - my MiL accidentally duplicated every song in her music collection, loaded them into iTunes (screwing up her iTunes library), then while trying to address that, blew away her entire music collection. She even emptied her trashcan. If TM/TC hadn't been taking automatic backups of her Macbook Pro, she would have lost everything. Because I had forced her to buy it, I was able to walk her through restoring her music folder to the day before and resolved the issue.

$500 ain't cheap, but the product is awesome.

It's a $500 AFP mount. You don't need a Time Capsule for that. You can just use a really cheap and generic external drive. Infact, for the average Mac user you can probably get away with a lot less in terms of storage.

Time Machine is potentially somewhat interesting. A Time Capsule is just a product from inside the Walled Garden that Time Machine plays nicely with.

Ah, but a Time Capsule sits on the network and can be used as a target by multiple machines. An external drive can't backup my wife's laptop and my own, and our Mac Pro, without swapping it around and making it a manual process. A Time Capsule just sits there and works in the background. There is a lot to be said for that-a backup that runs is better than a backup that has to be run.

for people like my mother-in-law and parents, Time Capsules are worth their weight in gold. The overpriced thing works with Time Machine to automagically take frequent backups and store them over wifi...I haven't seen another product on the market that does what Time Machine/Capsules do that is as easy to use...$500 ain't cheap, but the product is awesome.

I'm a techie and I still like mine. Bought the low capacity model as a refurb for $249 with the intention of upgrading the internal drive myself. Just checked the receipt...I bought it in 2008 and it still works; glad mine wasn't one of the models that died early. I love it. Yes, I keep clone backups as well, but not as often as Time Capsule updates itself. Time Capsule has saved my butt several times when I needed a file lost since my most recent manual backup.

Time Machine is potentially somewhat interesting. A Time Capsule is just a product from inside the Walled Garden that Time Machine plays nicely with.

No, it's actually both interesting and effective.

Example: My MacBookPro backs up wirelessly to a TC at home on an hourly basis, whenever I'm in range, automatically and without the slightest intervention on my part. (The same TC of course provides my WiFi home and guest networks, as well as a gigabit wired network.)

I have enough to do managing the office network, server and backup systems. The home TC is worth every penny for its convenience. And recovering files with Time Machine is child's play.

For $499 you can fly to Europe.For $499 you can buy a few hundred kilos of ice cream.For $499 you can pay many parking fines.For $499 you can buy a really nice 2.5 seater couch.For $499 you can pay for a lot of cooking classes.

Just thought I'd add some more utterly irrelevant comparisons, so TommySch didn't feel so alone.

Looking at the hardware specs this thing contains just a single disk 2-3TB Disk without any kind of redundancy. Must be great losing 3TB worth of backups. Typical Apple Product.

It's for backup, not archiving.

If it's for backups then there should be multiple copies. That's how people who do serious backups do backups. You can be creating garbage for days or weeks or a single piece of media can fail. If you're going to bother, then you might as well try and do it right. Otherwise you are taking advantage of n00bs and giving them a false sense of security.

There are multiple copies: there is the original, and there is one on the Time Capsule. How is that not multiple? And drive redundancy is not creating multiple copies, so how is that the solution? Seriously, what is your solution to get a backup made to multiple media sets and have it be easy to use by most users?

What JEDEDIAH is probably not aware of is that Time Machine is a versioning system that by default provides snapshots every hour. He's right that it's not multiple copies in the sense of having the same thing on multiple drives, but wrong to assume that the same thing on multiple drives is "a real" backup for all users.

There are (for example) lots of cheap RAID mirror enclosures out there sold to consumers and tech nerds that mostly create instant backups of mistakes and make those mistakes the new baseline.

As the owner of a 2TB time capsule I've got to admit I'm quite disappointed at the price and lack of additional capabilities (so far). Regarding the price I understand that Steve likes his fat margins but this goes beyond the obscene at this stage since the 3TB is basically close to as expensive as the 2TB version was more than one year ago (if not more).... Either the rate of technical (and technological) progress is seriously decreasing at Apple or they are using gold platted disks but this certainly requires an explanation.As far as the lack of additional features is concerned, well, this makes the upgrade from a previous Time Capsule a seriously uninteresting option as plugging in a bigger USB drive (even a server one) is just a little less simple but way cheaper.

I thought Apple was capable both of delivering better improvements and of displaying more respect to their customers but I stand doubly disappointed.(please abstain of worthless comments such as "what did you expect", we're not in high school anymore thank you)

Looking at the hardware specs this thing contains just a single disk 2-3TB Disk without any kind of redundancy. Must be great losing 3TB worth of backups. Typical Apple Product.

If you lose your backup, presumably the data is still on the originating device. If you want enterprise level backup, you want to be backing up to a proper server with a RAID array and tape for off-site storage. This is aimed at home users.

That's exactly what I did recently. My refurbed Extreme was as pristine as a brand new one, and works flawlessly. All I had to do was plug a cheap USB hard drive into the back, and it does everything a much more expensive Time Capsule does.

Looking at the hardware specs this thing contains just a single disk 2-3TB Disk without any kind of redundancy. Must be great losing 3TB worth of backups. Typical Apple Product.

If you lose your backup, presumably the data is still on the originating device. If you want enterprise level backup, you want to be backing up to a proper server with a RAID array and tape for off-site storage. This is aimed at home users.

Does it do scrubbing or healing of the information on the TimeMachine? Otherwise you can be sitting with 3TB or garbage and you'll never know until your machine crashes and you try to recover.

IIRC there were a issues with that on the 1st gen TimeMachines.

The basic idea is really good. Having a solution that makes it trivially easy to make backups is a great idea. Having different snapshots of backups is also a great idea. Naturally it's possible to do on other OSes as well, but it's not as easy to use.

The problem is that in order to have a working backup solution it's important that the data you write to the disk is secure and that you know if data is corrupt before you try to read it back. (Because hard drives fail, that's a fact of life.) Then you can worry about minimizing risk by adding redundant storage, and off-site storage and so on.

If it's for backups then there should be multiple copies. That's how people who do serious backups do backups. You can be creating garbage for days or weeks or a single piece of media can fail. If you're going to bother, then you might as well try and do it right. Otherwise you are taking advantage of n00bs and giving them a false sense of security.

As others have pointed out, the whole idea of Time Machine is that it provides automatic incremental backups, with an interface to navigate them. If you've been creating garbage for days or weeks: scroll back to a month ago, instead, and restore that.

With a Time Capsule, if you're concerned about media failure, you can connect an external USB drive to it and archive its contents onto that -- making a backup of your backup. Plus, I fail to see how the notion that a backup drive can fail gives people a false sense of security; it's a backup drive! It's mere existence is providing a layer of redundancy more than people might otherwise have, if it weren't this convenient.

JEDIDIAH wrote:

It's a $500 AFP mount. You don't need a Time Capsule for that. You can just use a really cheap and generic external drive. Infact, for the average Mac user you can probably get away with a lot less in terms of storage.

Time Machine is potentially somewhat interesting. A Time Capsule is just a product from inside the Walled Garden that Time Machine plays nicely with.

... over a network. And includes a dual band 802.11n / gig-e router that plays nicely with other luxuries from Apple's garden. Keep in mind that, by performing the backup over the network, it sits invisibly in the background -- no need to remember to plug in an external drive (e.g. for laptops) and it can provide automatic backups for multiple devices.

Fundamentally, I agree. Time Capsule is by no means necessary to use the Time Machine backup feature -- or even Time Machine backups over a network -- and it's expensive for what it is, but there is a level of elegance to the hassle-free convenience it promises. (A promise which earlier hardware revisions had trouble fulfilling, but those problems seem to be resolved.)

On its original 2008 release, the pricing for Time Capsules was fairly competitive with the price of a comparable router ($150+) + same-sized hard drive + USB hard drive enclosure ($30). Apple likes to keep price points the same, but the hard drive market doesn't always provide models with the right price points to justify that -- and the prices of hard drives tend to drop more quickly than the rate at which Apple refreshes their models. The 2TB / $299 model isn't bad, depending on the model of hard drive used.

But $499 for the 3TB version? No deal. If there were 4TB hard drives on the market, for, say, $250-300, Apple would probably have used those, and the $499 price point would seem justified. But they do not exist yet, and using a $180 3TB instead ... they're charging $100 more than they ought to.

As far as the lack of additional features is concerned, well, this makes the upgrade from a previous Time Capsule a seriously uninteresting option as plugging in a bigger USB drive (even a server one) is just a little less simple but way cheaper.

I thought Apple was capable both of delivering better improvements and of displaying more respect to their customers but I stand doubly disappointed.

Respect? Seriously?

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are somehow obligated to buy the latest and greatest models, every year, and that Apple should improve their products enough to let you justify your compulsion to yourself.

No one at Apple expects you to upgrade your year-old Time Capsule to the new model. They did not update them to lure existing owners into upgrading -- they updated them to keep pace with technology and hard drive pricing.

Related: Apple does not expect you to buy a new laptop every year. Apple does not expect you to buy a new iPhone or iPod every year.

Apple does not update their products to tempt existing owners into upgrading. Apple also does not drop support for old products to compel those owners into replacing their devices.

What Apple does do is continue to improve their products so that when you needs or wants to replace your laptop/phone/etc, an Apple product is the most appealing option.

What Apple also does is show their respect for their customers (and instil a sense of brand loyalty) by continuing to offer updates to older products for as long as is reasonably possible without compromising user experience. When they stop updating something, it's not because they want to make you upgrade, it's because the updates can't run with sufficient speed on the old hardware, or because making the updates compatible with the old hardware would limit the software advancements they could make on newer devices.

Example: People complained about iPhone 3G not receiving all of the new features in iOS 4, and then dropping support as of iOS 4.3. That's looking at it backwards: I dare you to name any phone maker other than Apple that's offered free software updates containing substantial new features for a model over 2 years after it was released.

Ok, so what is the difference between the new Airport Extreme and the old one? 'Cos nothing is jumping out at me!

Yeah- that's my question too- wasn't the old one 3x3 antennas? I'm not sure what else they can do to improve the Airport Extreme. (I am not saying they are perfect now, just that I honestly don't know what else can be improved to keep pace with other routers-any info would be welcome)

At the wireless level they could, among other things- go to 4 internal antennas- support some of the n protocol features (eg short guard times and more efficient MAC) that the current base station does not (as far as I can tell) support. Short guard times would boost performance (for the right clients) by about 10%. Better MAC could (so I'm told, I've never seen any hardware that supports it) boost performance by almost 50%.

The extent that they can support these (and the usual stuff you might like, like just better RF electronics, and better signal processing algorithms) depends, of course, on the chip set. We need iFixIt to rip one apart and tell us that.

At a higher level, there are two obvious features they can offer:- QOS of various sorts, most obviously throttling UPLINK packets so that ACKs for DOWNLINK packets are not throttled. - transparent proxy caching. Put squid on the box, and households with multiples devices will see various things get a little (or a lot) faster. Examples would be multiple devices hitting the same websites (eg news sites), or downloads of system updates, or iTunes (since iTunes' crappy crappy web store code does not seem to do any web caching).

They could also do some interesting stuff with DNS, eg run a test of DNS server speeds once a day or so, and transparently (if the user allows this of course) switch to whichever is fastest.

Ok, so what is the difference between the new Airport Extreme and the old one? 'Cos nothing is jumping out at me!

Yeah- that's my question too- wasn't the old one 3x3 antennas? I'm not sure what else they can do to improve the Airport Extreme. (I am not saying they are perfect now, just that I honestly don't know what else can be improved to keep pace with other routers-any info would be welcome)

I looked at wikipedia, it seems Final N instead of Draft N.

This is not new. The previous model, released what, a year ago (?), was final n.

Ok, so what is the difference between the new Airport Extreme and the old one? 'Cos nothing is jumping out at me!

Yeah- that's my question too- wasn't the old one 3x3 antennas? I'm not sure what else they can do to improve the Airport Extreme. (I am not saying they are perfect now, just that I honestly don't know what else can be improved to keep pace with other routers-any info would be welcome)

While I think Apple has one of, if not THE most reliable/stable consumer router around, there is plenty of room for improvement.

- You realize that Apple had a guest network in Airport what, two years ago?- I don't know what your DynDNS beef is. I've used DynDNS across at least three base stations for over five years. - The web based config is a more interesting issue. My guess is that Apple would say it's a combination of security and better UI (eg the app can draw nice graphs of the bit rate at which each client is currently connected). I don't know if either of those are the full explanation.

And being reliable is nothing to be sneered at. My friend who travels a lot has a variety of different base station+routers from different companies in different apartments around the world, not just the US but also some Asian countries, and she used to use a 2-Wire ATT box in her main house. EVERY freaking time she'd arrive at a new apartment, the first thing she'd have to do is reboot the routers to get them to work. And the ATT box at home eventually stopped working after complaining that more than about 15 different clients had connected to it (which is not a large number --- kids have laptops, iphones, ipads, friends come over, etc etc). I got her an Apple base station, switched off wireless on the 2-Wire box and connected it to the Apple base station, and no problems since then. 2-Wire boxes seem adequate as a modem, but either their wireless or their DHCP (or both) seem severely broken.

Ok, so what is the difference between the new Airport Extreme and the old one? 'Cos nothing is jumping out at me!

Yeah- that's my question too- wasn't the old one 3x3 antennas? I'm not sure what else they can do to improve the Airport Extreme. (I am not saying they are perfect now, just that I honestly don't know what else can be improved to keep pace with other routers-any info would be welcome)

Apple could bring back the external antenna port - AirPort Extreme range is lousy and not having external antenna support was a dumb decision.

You DO understand how MIMO works don't you? What do you think the MULTIPLE means?

Do you expect Apple to provide THREE antenna ports? And then deal with the phone calls and complaints when idiots don't use all three ports --- or place the three antennas in the wrong geometry relative to each other?

Looking at the hardware specs this thing contains just a single disk 2-3TB Disk without any kind of redundancy. Must be great losing 3TB worth of backups. Typical Apple Product.

It's for backup, not archiving.

If it's for backups then there should be multiple copies. That's how people who do serious backups do backups. You can be creating garbage for days or weeks or a single piece of media can fail. If you're going to bother, then you might as well try and do it right. Otherwise you are taking advantage of n00bs and giving them a false sense of security.

Sure. And your separate backups should be on different continents, connected by multiple different fiber-optic cables with backup satellite links....

Meanwhile in the real world, if this is so important to you, you do know that rsync runs on OSX right?There is NOTHING stopping you from running an rsync backup to a separate drive from your time machine backup. I do this and it works just fine.

It depends on your perspective. Don't get me wrong, for techies, it's a complete ripoff.

However, for people like my mother-in-law and parents, Time Capsules are worth their weight in gold. The overpriced thing works with Time Machine to automagically take frequent backups and store them over wifi. To get any lost data back, you go through the Time Machine interface to the point in time where you want to restore, and it pulls it back down. Want to restore 1 file? Pick it out. Want to restore a directory? Select that. Want to restore your entire machine to the state it was in 3 months ago? It does that. I haven't seen another product on the market that does what Time Machine/Capsules do that is as easy to use.

To give you a use case - my MiL accidentally duplicated every song in her music collection, loaded them into iTunes (screwing up her iTunes library), then while trying to address that, blew away her entire music collection. She even emptied her trashcan. If TM/TC hadn't been taking automatic backups of her Macbook Pro, she would have lost everything. Because I had forced her to buy it, I was able to walk her through restoring her music folder to the day before and resolved the issue.

$500 ain't cheap, but the product is awesome.

It's a $500 AFP mount. You don't need a Time Capsule for that. You can just use a really cheap and generic external drive. Infact, for the average Mac user you can probably get away with a lot less in terms of storage.

Then buy a fscking Base Station and hookup a USB drive to it. You do KNOW that you can do this, don't you?Or connect the USB drive to some other mac and back up over the network. You do KNOW that you can also do that?

You seem insanely determined to find fault with a device that is not even targeted at you. We get it, you build your own PCs. Great, so do I. But I have enough contact with the real world to know that there are PLENTY of people who want a fire and forget solution to their backup needs, and that is what Apple is selling them. Do you run around complaining that people pay for haircuts which they could perform themselves at home? That they pay for software they could write themselves? That they hire mechanics to fix their cars instead of taking a course in auto repair? That they don't grow their own food?

As far as the lack of additional features is concerned, well, this makes the upgrade from a previous Time Capsule a seriously uninteresting option as plugging in a bigger USB drive (even a server one) is just a little less simple but way cheaper.

I thought Apple was capable both of delivering better improvements and of displaying more respect to their customers but I stand doubly disappointed.

Respect? Seriously?

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are somehow obligated to buy the latest and greatest models, every year, and that Apple should improve their products enough to let you justify your compulsion to yourself.

You seem to be under the doubly mistaken impression that first you would know the details of my situation enough that you can judge whether my hypothetical need for an upgrade would be justified or not and second that I am actually considering an upgrade.

All I'm saying is that upgrading is price wise a silly option. There are plenty of other reasons which would make it justifiable though but that was not my take here.

Extrapolating a whole fantasy from a few (albeit precise) sentences is something you should stop doing.

Westacular wrote:

No one at Apple expects you to upgrade your year-old Time Capsule to the new model. They did not update them to lure existing owners into upgrading -- they updated them to keep pace with technology and hard drive pricing.

No? Really? Wouldn't have guessed.

Here you go again... Seriously, when did I say I wanted to upgrade? And even if I wanted, what would you know about my backup needs?

Westacular wrote:

Apple does not update their products to tempt existing owners into upgrading. Apple also does not drop support for old products to compel those owners into replacing their devices.

What Apple does do is continue to improve their products so that when you needs or wants to replace your laptop/phone/etc, an Apple product is the most appealing option.

What Apple also does is show their respect for their customers (and instil a sense of brand loyalty) by continuing to offer updates to older products for as long as is reasonably possible without compromising user experience. When they stop updating something, it's not because they want to make you upgrade, it's because the updates can't run with sufficient speed on the old hardware, or because making the updates compatible with the old hardware would limit the software advancements they could make on newer devices.

Example: People complained about iPhone 3G not receiving all of the new features in iOS 4, and then dropping support as of iOS 4.3. That's looking at it backwards: I dare you to name any phone maker other than Apple that's offered free software updates containing substantial new features for a model over 2 years after it was released.

Sorry, but you're going from cynical to frankly naive there. they certainly hope to tempt existing owners into upgrading, every vendor does. They're not a charity or a philanthropic association: they're here for the money and if people kept buying the exact same product repeatedly they wouldn't bother with upgrading them.

Your love and trust toward this entity is misplaced, it's just a for profit company, nothing else.